Broken City Lab is an artist-led collective working to explore and unfold curiosities around locality, infrastructures, education and creative practice leading towards civic change. BCL’s projects, events, workshops, performances and interventions offer a sometimes momentary, sometimes extended, injection of creativity into a situation, surface, place or community. These projects continually connect various disciplines through research and social practice, generating works and interventionist tactics that adjust, critique, annotate and re-imagine the city. BCL’s projects and research have been featured in Fuse Magazine, Public Journal, C Magazine, Creative Time’s Social Practice Archive, Next American City, Alternatives, GOOD, the National Post, the Toronto Star, NPR (WDET, NPHR), CBC Radio One, CBC television, Le Téléjournal, The Windsor Star, the A-Channel, Wooster Collective, PSFK and Tree Hugger, presented and exhibited across North America including the Art Gallery of Windsor, TRUCK Gallery, Forest City Gallery, Propeller Centre, Open Engagement, Martha Street Studio, Hamilton Artists Inc. and CAFKA, and have been supported by the Ontario Arts Council’s Multidisciplinary Arts, Integrated Arts, Artists in the Community/Workplace and Media Arts programmes, the University of Windsor Humanities Research Group, OPIRG Windsor and the City of Windsor.

Aleesa Cohene (born 1976) is a Vancouver-born artist who has been producing videos since 2001. Her work has shown in festivals and galleries across Canada as well as in Brazil, Cambodia, Germany, Netherlands, Russia, Scandinavia, Turkey and the United States. She has won prizes at Utrecht’s Impakt Festival and Toronto’s Images Festival. She has also participated in artist residencies in the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne, Germany. She is currently pursuing graduate studies in the Masters of Visual Studies program at the University of Toronto.

Annie MacDonell is a Toronto-based visual artist working in a variety of media. Moving between appropriation, re-animation and deconstruction, her practice includes photography, film, installation, sculpture and sound. She studied photography at Ryerson’s School of Image Arts, followed by an MFA at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France. Annie MacDonell has exhibited and screened film works across Canada and internationally. Most recently, she has had solo shows at the Art Gallery of Windsor and at Mercer Union and Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Art Projects, both in Toronto. She has also participated in group shows at The Power Plant in Toronto, Le Grand Palais in Paris and Mulherin+Pollard in New York. In the spring of 2012, her work will be featured as part of the Toronto Now series at the AGO, in a solo show produced in collaboration with the Images Festival. She is currently working on a series of films interrogating the idea of the originality after the end of the 20th century.

Nicholas Pye & Sheila Pye, Musing, Digital C-Print, 48 x 48”, 2006.

Nicholas Pye and Sheila Pye. Nicholas Pye was born in Torquay, England in 1976. He lives and works in Toronto, Canada. As a musician, Nicholas released and toured with four albums in the mid 90’s. Moving from music to visual art, Nicholas completed his undergraduate degree at the Ontario College of Art and Design in spring 2002 and his Masters of Fine Art degree at Concordia University in Cinema production in 2005. In 2011, Nicholas began working on his doctorial degree in Visual Art at York University. He maintains an active art practice both independently and collaboratively with Sheila Pye, which integrates their collective interests in performance, cinema and large format still photography. Sheila Pye was born near Hamilton, Ontario in 1978. She studied painting, photography and video at the Ontario College of Art and Design, where she graduated winning the top scholarship. She completed her MFA in film production at Concordia University in Montréal. Currently, she lives and works in Madrid, Spain. Her work has been exhibited internationally in art galleries, museums and film festivals. She has been the recipient of numerous awards for her filmmaking and visual art. Sheila also maintains an active collaborative art practice with Nicholas Pye, which integrated their common interests in performance, cinema and large format still photography.

Derek Sullivan. Employing formal and textual elements that frequently contradict and alter relationships with one another, Derek Sullivan draws upon overlapping histories of modernist design, abstraction and conceptual art to unsettle notions of meaning and authorship. Sullivan uses drawing and sculpture, in addition to producing various ephemeral conceptual projects, to explore his interest in reinterpreting familiar forms in order to open up new areas of inquiry. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at The Power Plant, Toronto, where he was awarded The Power Plant’s 2011 commission; Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto (2011); KIOSK, Ghent (2011); University of Waterloo Art Gallery (2010); Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Lethbridge (2008); White Columns, New York (2008) and Tatjana Pieters/OneTwenty Gallery, Ghent (2008). He has been included in group exhibitions at Oakville Galleries (2001); Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art contemporain (2008); Artists Space, New York (2007); the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2007) and The Power Plant (2005 and 2006). Sullivan has been long-listed for The Sobey Art Award in 2009 and 2011. In 2011 his work was featured in the Biennale de Montréal.